A cynic comments that the United Nations exists so that nations,
who are unable to do anything individually, can get together to decide
that nothing can be done collectively. Someone famously said of Richard
Wagner that his music is not as bad as it sounds. The same is true of
the UN. It may not be a perfect organisation, yet there are many good
people who are devoted to it, still. The reason for their faith in the
world body is that it seeks to replace the balance of power with a
community of power and represents the dream of a world ruled by reason.
The world is a better place because it exists, because of what it does,
and because of how it does them.

Violence is endemic in nature and human society. Wars between
states have been an enduring but far from an endearing feature. It is an
affront to modern sensibility. Looking at the pervasive, ubiquitous
reality of interstate and intergroup armed violence, the question
arises: how do we impress on conflict-inflamed consciousness the gulf
between the goals sought, the price paid and the results gained?

Historically, peace was maintained by the great powers. The
breakdown of the Concert of Europe system in 1914 and 1939 discredited
the old balance-of-power system and visionary leaders began to look for
alternatives in international organisations. Both with the League of
Nations and the United Nations, people horrified by the destructiveness
of modern wars decided to create institutions for avoiding a repetition
of such catastrophes. An important step in the development of the
antiwar norm was the Pact of Paris of 1928 which declared war to be
illegal. The UN's establishment was the next important milestone on
the journey to tame the use of force as a means of settling
international quarrels.

The League began as the embodiment of humanity's aspirations
for a better and safer world. The UN was closely modelled on the League,
testimony to the fact that while the League had failed, people still had
faith in the idea of an international organisation to oversee world
peace and cooperation. The most important League legacy bequeathed to
the UN was the concept, by now firmly entrenched but revolutionary one
hundred years ago, that the community of nations has both the moral
right and the legal competence to discuss and judge the use of force by
states.

A hundred years ago, war was an accepted institution with
distinctive rules, etiquette, norms and stable patterns of practices. In
that Hobbesian world, the only protection against aggression was
countervailing power, which increased both the cost of victory and the
risk of failure. Since 1945, the UN has spawned a corpus of law to
stigmatise aggression and create a robust norm against it. Now there are
significant restrictions on the authority of states to use force either
domestically or internationally. The UN incorporated the League
proscription on the use of force for national objectives, but inserted
the additional prescription to use force in support of international,
that is UN, authority.

The nature of warfare has changed fundamentally since 1945. Instead
of huge mechanised armies, today's wars are mostly fought with
small arms and light weapons, between weak government forces and
ill-trained rebels. In most contemporary conflicts, disease and
malnutrition resulting from warfare kill far more people than missiles,
bombs and bullets. There has also been a shift over time in where wars
are being fought. More people are being killed in Africa's wars
today than in the rest of the world combined. Moreover, violent
conflicts in Africa exacerbate the very conditions that gave rise to
them in the first place, creating a classic 'conflict trap'
from which escape is difficult.

This article disaggregates the UN role of maintaining international
peace and security into the separate elements of pacific settlement,
collective security, peace operations, arms control and disarmament,
legal adjudication, and peacebuilding. An effort is made to analyse the
historical record in order to connect the past to the future and to
demonstrate changes that might be required in the institutional
machinery in order to enhance the UN's peace maintenance role.

Pacific Settlement

The trend towards narrowing the permissible range of unilateral
resort to force by states has been matched by efforts to broaden the
international instruments available to settle interstate disputes by
peaceful means. The 2005 Human Security Report challenged many
widely-held myths. By 2003, there were 40 percent fewer conflicts than
in 1992. The deadliest (those with more than 1000 battle-deaths) fell by
80 percent. Nearly 700,000 people were killed in battle in 1950 in
total; in 2002 the figure was 20,000. The average number of those killed
per battle in 1950 was 38,000, plummeting to 600 in 2002. Genocides,
international crises and military coups were also dramatically down.
Over the past 30 years, on average, fewer than 1000 people a year have
been killed by international terrorists: a fraction of those killed in
warfare. The UN has played a critical role in driving these positive
changes. Its efforts increased between fourfold to tenfold to stop wars
starting (preventive diplomacy), end ongoing conflicts (peacemaking),
mount peace operations and impose sanctions (which can help pressure
warring parties into peace negotiations).

One of the most delicate forms of UN intervention is through the
Secretary-General's good offices. This institutional point is
likely to be the most active in pacific settlement in the foreseeable
future. The political role of the Secretary-General was a novel
phenomenon of post-1945 world politics. Article 99 of the Charter
authorises him to bring to the attention of the Security Council
'any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of
international peace and security'. The carefully crafted language
is instructive: any matter, without limitation; matter, not dispute or
conflict; in his opinion, not in the judgment of others; may threaten,
not actually threatening. Article 99 confers on the Secretary-General
both a broad reservoir of authority and a wide margin of discretion
requiring the exercise of political judgment, tact and integrity.

The pacific settlement of disputes under chapter 6 is potentially
among the Secretary-General's most valuable political roles with
respect both to conflict prevention and constructive collaboration. The
Secretary-General is in regular contact with representatives of many
governments, chief executives of international organisations and
multinational corporations and civil society organisations. This
multi-textured milieu of international relations provides the
Secretary-General with many opportunities to probe and explain, test and
tease, persuade and dissuade; to engage in diplomatic parlance but also
to exercise ideational leadership. Quiet diplomacy within the
confidential confines of the Secretary-General's private office can
be supplemented or substituted by the occasional public diplomacy of the
UN's bully pulpit.

But the Secretary-General cannot act in isolation from the shifting
power structures of world politics. Rather, his exercise of
international leadership is subject to the systemic and structural
constraints of a unipolar world order whose bedrock organisational
principle is state sovereignty. He must play a political role
complementary to the Security Council and never in competition with it;
respectful of the pivotal role of the Council in maintaining peace and
security while mindful of the political temper in the General Assembly,
which is the truer barometer of the sentiments of the international
community. When the major powers and groups are bitterly divided, the
Secretary-General must strive to forge a fragile agreement by
identifying common elements, reminding member states of the Charter
principles, nudging them towards face-saving formulations that can
recreate a sense of common purpose and appealing for calm and unity.

The most important requirement for the Secretary-General is to
exercise the skills of soft leadership: the elusive ability to make
others connect emotionally and intellectually to a larger cause that
transcends their immediate self-interest. Leadership consists of
articulating a bold and noble vision for a community, establishing
standards of achievement and conduct, explaining why they matter, and
inspiring or coaxing others to adopt the agreed goals and benchmarks as
their personal goals.

The method of selection and the terms of office undercut the
prospects of those rare individuals who combine the qualities of
inspirational, robust, effective and aspirational leadership. The
Security Council vote on the Secretary-General's election is
subject to veto. This immediately changes the thrust from selecting
someone who commands the widest following to someone who is least
unacceptable to the major powers. The procedure places a premium on a
non-activist, pliant Secretary-General. The General Assembly should
reclaim an active, not merely a reactive, role in the selection of the
Secretary-General. With the current crisis over the chief of the
International Monetary Fund, we have a fresh opportunity to change the
modus operandi of choosing the chief executives of international
organisations. If Europe and the United States agreed to a genuinely
open recruitment process whereby the best person in the world was chosen
as the president of the IMF and the World Bank, then we may be able to
apply the same criterion to the choice of the next Secretary-General.
But the developing countries are never going to agree to the idea that
the World Bank and IMF chiefs should be the discretionary choice of the
US and the EU respectively but the UN Secretary-General should be chosen
form a worldwide pool.

Collective Security

Collective security entails the imposition of binding diplomatic,
economic and military sanctions against international outlaws under
chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Efforts to devise an operational collective
security system have been thwarted by a fundamental tension in the
concept. War between lesser states, however deplorable and unhealthy for
their nationals, cannot endanger world peace. Collective security
understood as the maintenance of international peace and security is
therefore superfluous in respect of small states. Equally, however, it
is impossible to enforce against major powers, since any attempt to
launch military measures against a great power would bring about the
very calamity that the system is designed to avoid, namely a world war.

The UN sought to avoid the latter eventuality by conferring
permanent membership of the Security Council upon the great powers with
the accompanying right of veto. The practical effect of the veto is that
the virtually unlimited decision-making competence of the Council,
necessary for the successful operation of a collective security system,
is curtailed by the equally extensive decision-blocking competence of
the P5.

The closest that the UN has come to engaging in collective
enforcement action was in Korea in 1950. Yet its collective security
character was heavily qualified. Action in Korea was made possible by a
temporary marriage of convenience between UN-centred collective security
and US-centred collective defence. As in Korea in the 1950s, the
advantage of action by an UN-authorised multinational coalition in the
Persian Gulf in 1990-91 was that it allowed the UN to approximate the
achievement of collective security within a clear chain of command
necessary for large-scale military operations. The cost was that both
wars became identified with American policy, over which the organisation
exercised little real control.

The decision by a US-led coalition to wage war on Iraq in 2003
without UN authorisation so split the international community that
Secretary-General Kofi Annan assembled a group of 16 distinguished
experts to forge a new consensus on the norms and laws governing the use
of force in world affairs in relation to contemporary threats. Its
report concluded that threats can come from state and nonstate actors
and endanger human as well as national security. Collective security is
necessary because today's threats cannot be contained within
national boundaries, are interconnected and have to be addressed
simultaneously at all levels. The panel endorsed UN-authorised but not
unilateral preventive action. The UN will likely continue to remain
engaged with a broad and broadening conception of security well beyond
the traditional parameters of conventional military attack by uniformed
soldiers across territorial borders.

Created from the ashes of the Second World War with the allies
determined to prevent a repeat of Hitler's horrors, for most of its
existence the UN has focussed much more on external aggression than
internal mass killings. Yet Nazi Germany was guilty of both. Unlike
aggression against other countries, the systematic and large-scale
extermination of Jews utilising industrial-scale efficiency was a new
horror. The convergence of the interests of human rights and
humanitarian communities with respect to protecting victims of atrocity
crimes has been given expression as the responsibility to protect. The
protection of civilians caught in the crossfire of deadly conflict is
now a key criterion of success for peace operations.

In 2005, world leaders unanimously agreed that every state has the
responsibility to protect all people within its jurisdiction and that,
where one was manifestly failing in its sovereign duty, the
international community would take 'timely and decisive'
collective action to honour the international responsibility to protect
people against atrocities. The international responsibility applies
narrowly to just four crimes: ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes. But there are no limits to what can be done in
responding to these atrocity crimes. On 17 March 2011, Security Council
Resolution 1973 authorised the use of 'all necessary measures ...
to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas' in Libya: the
first UN-sanctioned combat operations since the 1991 Gulf War. Carefully
crafted both to authorise and delimit the scope of intervention, it
specified the purpose of military action as humanitarian protection but
prohibited invading or occupying Libya.

On 30 March, in Resolution 1975 the Security Council authorised the
UN peace operation in Cote d'Ivoire 'to use all necessary
means to carry out its mandate to protect civilians under imminent
threat of physical violence'. The responsibility to protect and
civilian protection agendas are complementary and mutually reinforcing.
The first is mainly normative, the second is largely operational. The
two share legal underpinnings, normative weight and Security Council
commitments under human rights, international humanitarian and refugee
laws. Civilian protection embraces all measures to protect the safety,
dignity and integrity of all human beings, but only in times of war. The
first part is thus considerably broader and less precise than the four
specific acts under the responsibility to protect. But the latter is
broader in being concerned with the prevention and protection of
atrocity crimes in all circumstances, not merely during armed conflict.
Protecting populations at risk of mass killings using coercive means in
a non-permissive environment is its primary goal. For most peace
operations, protecting civilians, in what has been negotiated to be a
permissive environment but may have threatening components, is an
implied or derivative goal, often a moral but not a mandated duty.

The two agendas converge during the commission of atrocity crimes.
In Libya and Cote d'Ivoire, regimes that had lost both domestic and
international legitimacy declared war on their own people. Global
political responses to both were shaped by universal values rather than
strategic interests, with member states mirroring traditional UN policy
and perspectives. Because the UN is taking the lead in redefining
sovereignty by aligning state prerogatives with the will and consent of
the people, the ruling class of any country must now fear the risk and
threat of international economic, criminal justice and military action
if they violate global standards of conduct and cross UN red lines of
behaviour.

Peacekeeping

The instrument of choice by the UN for engaging with the
characteristic types of contemporary conflicts is peacekeeping, which
evolved in the grey zone between pacific settlement and military
enforcement. The number of operations increased dramatically after the
end of the Cold War. Reflecting the changing nature of modern armed
conflict, UN operations expanded also in the nature and scope of their
missions. Many of the tenets of classical peacekeeping were realigned
with the new political realities based on the Brahimi Report in 2000.

The need for UN peacekeeping remains and will continue. Today there
are around 120,000 personnel from 115 countries serving in 15 UN peace
operations around the world, at an annual cost of almost eight billion
dollars. UN peace operations have to undertake tasks like military
disengagement, demobilisation and cantonment; policing; human rights
monitoring and enforcement; observation, organisation and conduct of
elections; rehabilitation and repatriation; and temporary
administration. Sometimes the UN had to undertake
'peace-enforcement' operations, at other times it authorised
enforcement operations that were actually undertaken by a single power
or ad hoc multilateral coalitions. In Kosovo and East Timor peace
enforcement operations were preludes to transitional international
administrations.

Modern peacekeeping demands a broad range of skills and competence,
including innovation, initiative and integrity. Peacekeepers have to
determine the application of relevant domestic, international
humanitarian and human rights law to their conduct and operation.
Civilian, police and military elements have to cooperate willingly and
coordinate effectively with one another and with NGOs. They have to be
adaptable as the focus changes from security in one mission to
humanitarian assistance in another and peacebuilding in yet a third. All
this and more must be done in harmony with professional colleagues in a
truly multinational, multicultural and multilingual effort operating in
highly localised and particularised theatres.

The Rand Corporation undertook a comparative assessment of UN and
US experience in peace operations. The UN is better at low profile,
small footprint operations where soft power assets of international
legitimacy and local impartiality compensate for hard power deficit. The
quality of UN peacekeeping troops, police officers and civilian
administrators is more uneven and their arrival on the scene is often
tardy. Multinational diversity can slow down the pace of decision-making
in the UN system: its very strength, universality, is a major impediment
to efficient and speedy action. But military reversals are less damaging
for the UN because military force is not the source of its credibility,
whereas they strike at the very heart of the basis of US influence. In
order to overcome domestic scepticism for overseas missions, American
policymakers define the mission grandly and make the operations hostage
to their own rhetoric. UN missions are outcomes of highly negotiated,
densely bureaucratic and much more circumspect documents.

UN operations tend to be undermanned and under-resourced, deploying
small and weak forces into post-conflict situations under best-case
assumptions. If the assumptions prove false, the forces are reinforced,
withdrawn or rescued. Washington deploys US troops under worst-case
assumptions with overwhelming force to establish a secure environment
quickly. The total number of UN peacekeepers may be modest by the
standards of American expeditionary capability but is more than any
other country or coalition can field. UN missions have been the more
successful--a higher proportion of local countries were left in peaceful
and democratic conditions than with US operations.

The UN needs an effective peacekeeping capacity commensurate with
the demands placed on it. It needs strategic reserves that can be
deployed rapidly. The establishment of an interlocking system of
peacekeeping capacities would enable it to work with regional
organisations in predictable and reliable partnerships. There is also
renewed interest in the idea of a small but robust and rapidly
deployable UN ready reaction force that could be rushed to trouble spots
and in humanitarian emergencies.

Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament

With the Charter signed just weeks before the first use of atomic
weapons, the UN has been engaged with nuclear arms control and
disarmament from the start. The very first General Assembly resolution
called for the newly established UN Atomic Energy Commission to make
proposals for the elimination of atomic weapons and other weapons of
mass destruction.

The goal of containing the spread and enlargement of weapons and
arms stockpiles has rested on three pillars: norms, treaties, and
coercion. The momentum generated by the historic and favourable changes
after the end of the Cold War was allowed to lapse. More and more
countries began to bump against the nuclear weapons ceiling at the same
time as the world energy crisis encouraged a move to nuclear energy.
Nuclear arms control is back on the international agenda with a
vengeance. The fourfold crisis arises from non-compliance with
obligations of the NPT by some states engaged in undeclared nuclear
activities; other states that have failed to honour their disarmament
obligations; nuclear armed states that are not party to the NPT; and
nonstate actors seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. In addition, we face
dangers of weaponisation of outer space.

New momentum has been injected into the international nuclear
debate over the last two years by agenda-setting statements and reports
from the Obama administration, international panels and commissions
including especially the International Commission on Nuclear
Nonproliferation and Disarmament, the Washington Nuclear Security
Summit, the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1887, the successful
management of the 2010 NPT Review Conference, and the signing and
ratification of the New START Treaty. But there is a real risk that the
momentum will stall.

The NPT could be strengthened by making the IAEA Additional
Protocol mandatory for all states parties, toughening up or even
eliminating the exit clause and making clear that withdrawal from the
NPT will be treated as a threat to peace and security. But these cannot
be done without also addressing gaps on the disarmament side of the NPT
and reform of the composition and procedures of the Security Council.
The NPT contains a triangular linkage between verified nuclear
nonproliferation, cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and
nuclear disarmament. The pursuit of nuclear nonproliferation is doomed
without an accompanying duty to disarm. If nuclear weapons did not
exist, they could not proliferate. Because they do exist, they will
proliferate and be used again some day, whether by design,
miscalculation, or accident. Although the prospect of a nuclear war
between the five NPT nuclear weapons states has declined dramatically
since the end of the Cold War, their chances of being used amidst the
regional tensions in Northeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, as
also by a terrorist group, have increased. Good luck is at least as
responsible as sound stewardship for the non-use of nuclear weapons
since 1945.

The UN's strengths and assets are research, advocacy, norm
building and networking. It has established procedures and forums for
sustaining annual debates and discourses, provides a rare channel for
non-nuclear countries to network with one another and exert pressure on
the nuclear holdouts, tries to coordinate global regimes and regional
initiatives, and undertakes analytical, empirical and problem-solving
research. Its weaknesses are cumbersome procedures easily captured by
holdouts and recalcitrants to block any initiative, meagre resources
devoted to what is said to be among the gravest threats to international
security, and the most powerful enforcers of peace and security being
the worst offenders in terms of military arsenals and sales.

Peacebuilding

I define peacebuilding as actions undertaken to consolidate peace
and prevent violent conflicts from arising, intensifying (vertical
proliferation), spreading to new theatres or actors (horizontal
proliferation), persisting, or recurring. UN operations shifted over
time from a linear sequence of transition from war to peace to an
integrated approach to conflict prevention, conflict management and
peacebuilding. In parallel with this, the Security Council broadened its
understanding of threats to international peace and security to include
such subjects as children in armed conflict, small arms, the protection
of civilians in armed conflict, the role of natural resources in causing
and prolonging conflict, pandemics like HIV/AIDS and, most recently,
climate change.

'Peacebuilding' addresses both proximate and root causes
of conflicts through direct and structural measures. The new
Peacebuilding Commission aims to fill a critical gap in the
institutional architecture for maintaining international peace and
security. Its efficacy and authority will rest on the prestige of its
membership: representatives from the Security Council, donors, troop
contributors, ECOSOC and the General Assembly. Its work will be executed
by country-specific committees whose membership will include the country
recovering from conflict, other regional countries, major donors and
troop contributors, relevant regional organisations and international
financial institutions, and senior UN officials.

International Law and International Criminal Accountability

The law of the Charter governs when force may be used;
international humanitarian law governs how force may be used. While the
World Court deals with justice among states, the increasing attention
and sensitivity to human rights abuses and humanitarian atrocities raise
questions of individual criminal accountability in a world of sovereign
states.

The world has made revolutionary advances in the criminalisation of
domestic and international violence. The international community has
responded to barbarism by drafting and adopting international legal
instruments that ban it. Nuremberg and Tokyo were instances of
victors' justice. Yet by historical standards, both tribunals were
remarkable for giving defeated leaders the opportunity to defend their
actions in a court of law instead of being dispatched for summary
execution. The ad hoc tribunals of the 1990s were neither unqualified
successes nor total failures. They helped to bring hope and justice to
some victims, combat the impunity of some perpetrators and greatly
enrich the jurisprudence of international criminal and humanitarian law.
But they proved to be expensive and time-consuming and contributed
little to sustainable national capacities for justice administration.

The International Criminal Court offers hope for a permanent
reduction in the phenomenon of impunity. The landscape of international
criminal justice has changed dramatically in a remarkably short period
of time. In 1990, a tyrant could have been reasonably confident of the
guarantee of sovereign impunity for his atrocities. Today, there is no
guarantee of prosecution and accountability; but not a single brutish
ruler can be confident of escaping international justice. The certainty
of impunity is gone. The credit for the dramatic transformation of the
international criminal landscape belongs mainly to the UN. Libya's
Colonel Muammar Gadhafi is the latest but assuredly will not be the last
head of state to feel the sting of ICC indictment.

Legality, Legitimacy and the Rule of Law

Progress towards the good international society requires that force
be harnessed to authority. A gulf between lawful and legitimate use of
force is evidence of an erosion of the sense of international community.
Those who would challenge and overthrow the existing order must indicate
which is their preferred alternative system of rules, including dispute
resolution; simply rejecting an existing rule or norm, no matter how
unsatisfactory or unjust, in order to overthrow a particular ruler, no
matter how odious, is not enough.

Authority is the right to make policy and rules; power is the
capacity to implement the policy and enforce the rules. Lack of
enforcement capacity means that the UN remains an incomplete
organisation, one that practices only parts of its Charter. Conversely,
the US is global in reach and power but lacks international authority.
To the extent that the material capacity to deploy and use force at
various trouble spots around the world is concentrated in the US while
the authority to do so is legally vested in the Security Council, the
US--UN relationship will be the central dynamic shaping the UN role in
and contribution to conflict resolution and management in the
foreseeable future.

The thrust of the ongoing efforts to reform the UN is to make its
structures and operations more efficient and legitimate in order to
improve its performance and enhance its authority. The key executive
decision-making body for underwriting international peace and security
is the Security Council. If it remains essentially unreformed and
unreconstructed, the rest of the reform effort will amount to mere
tinkering and the UN will continue to suffer from a steady erosion of
legitimacy and authority and gradually fade into irrelevance.
Intriguingly, at a lecture at the UN University in Tokyo, Judge Rosalyn
Higgins, President of the World Court, even put forward a rule of law
argument for reforming the structure and procedures of the Security
Council in terms of equality before the law and law that is publicly
promulgated, independently adjudicated and impartially enforced.

A central challenge is how to combine the UN's unique
legitimacy and international authority with US global reach and power.
Some commentators pose the question as to why America should submit
voluntarily to 'Gulliverisation', tied down by innumerable
threads of international treaty and normative restraints, especially but
not solely with respect to the use of force overseas. Have the
structures and agreed procedures of multilateral forums become
dangerously detached from the underlying distribution of power? Even if
that were to be true to some extent, the Iraq War was a convincing
demonstration that the diplomatic transaction costs of a complete
withdrawal from multilateral forums, even for the United States, is a
very high price to pay.

At the same time, the volatility and turbulence that swept through
the organisation in the wake of the American--British invasion of Iraq
in 2003 was a sobering reminder that laws and norms--and the
institutions and organisations in which they are embedded--are not ends
in themselves, but instruments to a better ordering of the world. Should
they fail in this overarching goal, their members will look to
alternatives.

Conclusion

Many of the world's most intractable problems are global in
scope and will most likely require concerted multilateral action that is
also global in its reach. But the policy authority for tackling them
remains vested in states, and the competence to mobilise the resources
needed for tackling them is also vested in states. This strategic
disconnect goes some way to explaining the recurrent difficulties facing
the UN and the fitful nature of many of its responses.

Over time, the chief threats to international security have come
from violent eruptions of crises within states, while the goals of
promoting human rights and democratic governance, protecting civilian
victims of humanitarian atrocities, and punishing governmental
perpetrators of mass crimes have become more important. As a major
consequence of the changing nature and victims of armed conflict from
soldiers to civilians, including through excess deaths caused by
conflict-related disease and starvation, the need for clarity,
consistency and reliability in the use of armed force for civilian
protection lies at the heart of the UN's credibility in the
maintenance of peace and security.

Some have argued that the UN Charter was written in another age for
another world. Yet for many it is a living and breathing document that
remains vitally relevant today. It is the framework within which the
scattered and divided fragments of humanity come together to look for
solutions without passports to problems that respect no passports. We
must never fall victim to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Rather,
we must always hold the organisation to the more exacting standards of
exalted expectations.

The record shows a surprising UN capacity for policy innovation,
conceptual advances, institutional adaptation and organisational
learning. We have seen this with respect to peace operations, human
security and human rights, atrocity crimes and international criminal
justice, sanctions and the use of force, and the responsibility to
protect innocent civilians caught in the cross-fire and victims of
atrocity crimes. The vocabulary of democracy, good governance and human
rights has steadily advanced to become the language of choice in
international discourse.

Because human rights champion the rights and dignity of individual
human beings, it is entirely fitting that the great champions of the
human rights and international humanitarian law movements were such
giants of individuals as Raphael Lemkin who helped to bring the Genocide
Convention into being, Peter Benenson who founded Amnesty International,
and Henri Dunant who started the Red Cross. Their examples demonstrate,
very powerfully, that the chief impulse to human rights is the
recognition that every human being is deserving of equal moral
consideration. It is an acceptance of a duty of care by those ensconced
in safety towards those in zones of danger. We are indeed our
brother's keeper, all our brothers' and sisters' keepers
around the world. The UN's normative mandates on security,
development, human rights, civilian protection and the environment
embody this powerful intuition.

While the causes of war are many and complex, the call to end it is
single-minded and simple. Like terrorism, a war of choice is an
unacceptable tactic no matter how just the cause and deserves to be
similarly criminalised. Cynics insist that war is an inherent part of
human society. To end war would indeed be to end history. Maybe. But so
too have crime and poverty always been part of human history. Should we
give up then on the fight to end crime and poverty? Confronted with a
world they cannot change, reasonable people adapt their behaviour to
reality. But the turning points in human history have come from the
efforts of those unreasonable people--Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ,
Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela among them--who set out to change the
world instead. The long walk to freedom from war draws inspiration from
this thought.

Prof. Dr. Ramesh Thakur is Director of the Centre for Nuclear
Nonproliferation and Disarmament, Australian National University, and
Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Ethics, Governance and Law at
Griffith University. He was formerly Senior Vice Rector of the United
Nations University and a UN Assistant Secretary-General. He was a
Responsibility to Protect Commissioner and the Principal Writer of
Secretary-General Kofi Annan's 2002 reform report. His books
include The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security
to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press), Global
Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Indiana University Press),
The Responsibility to Protect: Norms, Laws and the Use of Force in
International Politics (Routledge), and The Oxford Handbook of Modern
Diplomacy (forthcoming).

COPYRIGHT 2011 Macedonian Information Centre
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.